Each step along the Buddha’s path to happiness requires practising mindfulness until it becomes part of your daily life.
You can learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them.
No matter how hard you pursue pleasure and success, there are times when you fail. No matter how fast you flee, there are times when pain catches up with you.
Mindfulness helps us freeze the frame so that we can become aware of our sensations and experiences as they are, without the distorting coloration of socially conditioned responses or habitual reactions.
You can’t ever get everything you want. It is impossible. Luckily, there is another option: You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of the endless cycle of desire and aversion.
The present moment is changing so fast that we often do not notice its existence at all. Every moment of mind is like a series of pictures passing through a projector. Some of the pictures come from sense impressions. Others come from memories of past experiences or from fantasies of the future.
We have to learn to be kind to ourselves. In the long run avoiding unpleasantness is a very unkind thing to do to yourself.
Discipline is a difficult word for most of us. It conjures up images of somebody standing over you with a stick, telling you that you’re wrong. But self-discipline is different. It’s the skill of seeing through the hollow shouting of your own impulses and piercing their secret.
Ignorance may be bliss, but it does not lead to liberation.
Peace is not a thought, not a concept; it is a nonverbal experience.
Whatever attitudes we habitually use toward ourselves, we will use on others, and whatever attitudes we habitually use toward others, we will use on ourselves.
Civilization changes man on the outside. Meditation softens him within, through and through.
You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that changes will flow naturally.
The principal cause of suffering is craving. Once craving is eliminated, much suffering will be eliminated. Still more suffering will be eliminated once ignorance is eliminated. Both craving and ignorance are equally powerful defilements that cause suffering.
Vipassana: looking into something with clarity and precision, seeing each component as distinct, piercing all the way through so as to perceive the most fundamental reality of that thing.
Let come what comes, and accommodate yourself to that, whatever it is. If good mental images arise, that is fine. If bad mental images arise, that is fine, too. Look on all of it as equal, and make yourself comfortable with whatever happens.
You can only have bliss if you don’t chase it.
Don’t cling to anything and don’t reject anything.
By silencing the mind, we can experience real peace. As long as various kinds of thoughts agitate the brain, we don’t experience 100 percent peace.
No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way, and you just never noticed.